First, thanks for your detailed opinion. You are right I could use 40 tapes
in the config but then I would like to have at least a dump level 0 once
per week, so how would I acheive that, I mean which config options in my
amanda.conf to use ? is something like that correct:
dumpcycle 5 days
runspercycle 5
tapecycle 40
runtapes 2
also what's the strategy to adopt when the set of 8 tapes is finished, take
it offsite and relabel the next ones ? Or should I label all 40 tapes in
one go ?
Regards
Marc
Gene Heskett To: marc.bigler AT day DOT com,
amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
<gene_heskett@i cc:
olinc.net> Subject: Re: Tape labelling and
strategy
11/29/02 01:04
PM
Please respond
to gene_heskett
On Friday 29 November 2002 04:16, marc.bigler AT day DOT com wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I would like to rotate between multiple sets of 8 tapes because my
> changer supports maximum 8 tapes. So I have defined the following
> in my amanda.conf:
>
>dumpcycle 5 days
>runspercycle 5
>tapecycle 8
>runtapes 2
>
>When one set of 8 tapes is finished I will take it offsite and
> then start up with the next set, I plan to have maybe 5 sets
> which i will constantly rotate which means overwritting stuff.
> What kind of labelling should I use for that ? I was thinking of
> something like
>
>nameXX-Y
>
>where XX is the tape number
>where Y is the set letter, for example:
>
>mysite03-B
>
>that would be tape number 4 from set B
>
>or should I simply use "nameXX" ? But then AMANDA won't keep any
> history of the other sets... What do you think ?
>
>Regards
>Marc
What you propose is equ to having a tapecycle of 40, and would be
much simpler for amanda to administer than it would be to maintain
5 different amanda configuration trees and remembering to do the
configuration switches in your amanda crontab. What you do with
the 8 tapes you take out each time the magazine is reloaded is up
to you, and amanda won't care as long as they are back on-site in
time to be re-used on schedule.
If you changed the config each time the magazine was reloaded, then
on the first run of each different config amanda is going to think
everything is way behind and attempt to do fulls on everything
because she is 32 days behind schedule *for the just switched in
config*. It makes more sense to amanda to just give her marching
orders and let her sort out the scheduleing. Amanda will then have
an inventory list of everything on the tapes, all 40 of them once
the tapecycle has been completed once.
For your own organization, I'd imagine the regex expression for the
tape label in amanda.conf could be modified to include an extra
character to define which magazine group this tape belonged in, and
amanda won't care since she will, unless something mucks the
schedule (and I've had it happen here), use them in the order they
were labeled anyway, NOT in the individual tapes order numerically.
That runtapes = 2 if its used by amanda, will lead to some
interesting human scheduleing 'adjustments' though. Will your
system really need that once it "gets into the beat", which will
take dumpcycle runs for the fulls, and tapecycle runs for the
partials IIRC?
Actually that will take longer if you follow a strategy of only
compressing that which can be compressed, by setting everything for
compression, reading the emails from amanda and turning off the
compression via a change in the disklist entry for those
directories/partitions that don't compress on a level 0 backup.
Directories full of rpms and tar.gz or tar.bz2's & such don't
compress, and may in fact expand somewhat if run through gzip a
second time. That takes about a dumpcycle to optimise. Some
expansion of level 1 and 2's is unavoidable because apparently the
minimum size for a tape record seems to be 64k. Such 'bookkeeping
expansions' are too small to actually count very much in terms of
tape past the head in the real world anyway.
--
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M
99.19% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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